“And yes, at that moment I did realize just how depressed I was, how fast I was sinking. The faculty doctor was back on duty that afternoon—I know this because he phoned me again that day to see how I was. That’s something I’ve also not told anybody, not even admitted to myself until now . . . the fact that he called me again and said I really needed to come in and see him.
“ ‘I have to pick my daughter up at school now,’ I informed him. Know what his reply was? ‘Not in your current state. Call a parent you know whose child is also at the nursery. Tell him or her that you’ve got an emergency at work and get them to bring your daughter home. Then come in and see me straightaway.’
“Did I heed this advice? No. I just said: ‘I’m fine, Doctor.’ Then I put down the phone and grabbed my coat and hat and jumped the T back to Cambridge to pick up Emily.
“That was the other insane variable in that afternoon. I never picked my daughter up at school during the week, as I had office hours until five. But on this one day, the nanny had asked if she could have the afternoon off, as she had some appointment at a podiatrist about her bad feet.
“Had Julia been there that day . . . had I not given her the time off . . .”
I stopped speaking again and put my hand on the door handle of the car and was about to press it and throw the door open and run off into the absolute nothingness of the Alberta plains. But I found myself thinking: And then what? The story can’t be avoided.
I started speaking again.
“ ‘Mommy, Mommy!’ Emily said as she saw me in the doorway of the nursery. ‘Can we go get a treat?’
“ ‘No problem, my love.’
“ ‘You tired, Mommy?’
“ ‘Don’t worry about it.’
“And I helped her on with her coat and led her by the hand out the door.
“I think there’s a coffee shop near here that does great sundaes,” I said. “But first you’ll have to eat something nutritious . . . like a hamburger.”
“ ‘Are hamburgers good for you?’
“ ‘They’re better than ice-cream sundaes.’
“Suddenly, in front of us, there was this commotion. An elderly woman—fat, heavy makeup, a stupid cigarette between her lips—was walking her terrier. The lead had broken and the terrier was running free, heading toward us. The woman was yelling its name. And then . . .
“What I told the police afterward was that Emily, all wide-eyed, broke free of my grip and chased right after it. I lunged for my daughter, screaming at her to stop. But she was already off the curb . . .
“That’s not the precise truth. Just as we saw the woman with the dog, I had another of those momentary blackouts I’d been suffering. It couldn’t have been more than two seconds. But in that time, Emily went off the curb and . . .
“Suddenly I came to. And saw my daughter two steps behind the dog, and a taxi barreling around the corner. The cabbie was going too fast and didn’t see Emily until . . .
“That’s when I screamed my daughter’s name. That’s when I lunged for her.
“But the cab hit her directly—and the impact sent her flying.”
I put my fists in my eyes. Black it out. Black it out.
Eventually I pulled my fists away. I steadied myself. Vern sat there, hushed, silent.
“What happened next . . . I was screaming and scooping up my daughter from the ground where she lay crumpled, and the woman with the fucking dog was screaming, and the cabbie—who turned out to be Armenian—was hovering over us, hysterical, saying it wasn’t his fault, he hadn’t seen her . . . ‘She suddenly there! She there! She there! She there!’ He kept repeating that, along with: ‘No chance! No chance! I have no chance!’
“Someone dialed 911. The cops came. The cabbie by this point was screaming at me to let him save her. ‘I bring her back . . . I bring her back.’ But I kept holding her against me, my head buried in her still-warm body, her neck totally limp, no breathing, no reaction to all this madness around her. Nothing . . .
“One of the cops gently tried to get me to let go of her. But I shrieked at him to go away. Then there were more sirens. An ambulance. The paramedic somehow managed to separate me from Emily. When I was coerced into letting her go and I saw one of the ambulance guys checking for vital signs and looking up at one of the cops and shaking his head . . . that’s when I lunged for the driver, screaming at him, calling him a murderer and . . .
“Two cops had to pull me off him. The cabbie was now so distraught that one of the paramedics had to hold him down. And then . . . then . . . I don’t remember much of then. Emily was placed on a stretcher and put into the ambulance. One of the cops—a woman—sat in the back of the cop car with me as we raced after it. She had her arm around me so tightly I couldn’t move, and told her colleague in the front seat to call for backup when we reached the hospital.
“ ‘Backup’ was a huge male nurse. He was waiting for me with a white-coated doctor. The doctor—a young guy—spoke quietly to me, and said they were going to give me something that would calm me down for a few hours. I somehow managed to promise I would stay calm. But as the woman cop helped me out of the car I made a break for it, screaming that I had to see Emily. That’s when the male nurse grabbed me and got me into a wrestler’s grip, and the doctor approached with a hypodermic and . . .
“When I awoke I discovered it was the next morning. I was in a bed—and I was being held down by restraints. A young nurse was on duty. She looked visibly pained when she saw I had come out of whatever they’d hit me with.
“ ‘I’ll be right back in a couple of minutes,’ she whispered. I sat there, staring up at the ceiling, telling myself: This is not happening . . . and knowing simultaneously that my world had just collapsed. When she returned some minutes later she was accompanied by a doctor—a quiet man in his midfifties—and a very sensible-looking woman also around the same age. He introduced himself as Dr. Martin and said that the woman standing next to him was Mrs. Potholm, and she would be my “social worker.” Social worker. Thinking back on it, they must have a very strict protocol drawn up for breaking the news to people . . . especially parents. And they must have decided that mentioning the fact that you have been assigned a social worker before delivering the body blow will, in some way, prepare you for the horror of the news. It’s like being told: ‘In a moment you’re about to be pushed off the ledge on the thirty-second floor’—and then the shove happening. It’s still a grotesque free fall . . . but at least you’re ready for it.
“ ‘Ms. Howard . . . Jane . . .” the doctor began, his voice just above a whisper. “ ‘Emily was admitted here dead on arrival yesterday evening. An autopsy was carried out very early this morning—and the cause of death was severance of the spinal cord and massive cranial injury. I mention this to let you know that Emily died instantly. I doubt she suffered. I doubt . . .’
“But I didn’t hear the rest of that sentence, as I turned away and started to howl. The social worker tried to speak with me, but I heard nothing. She tried to reason with me. I didn’t want reason. I just wanted to howl.
“Then, bam, another injection in my arm . . . and I was gone again.
“It was night when I awoke—and my best friend Christy was seated at my side.
“ ‘What are you doing here?’ I whispered to her.
“ ‘It seems you listed me as the person to get in touch with in the event of an emergency on your health insurance forms. So they called me and told me and I got the next plane to Boston and . . .’
“She started to cry. Tears cascading down her face. Trying to be brave for me and failing. I’d never seen Christy cry before—she was always too deliberately tough for that. But here she was, weeping and telling the nurse to get the damn restraints off my arms, then holding me as I let go and must have bawled my eyes out for around half an hour.
“Around an hour later—after a conversation with the social worker—they let me see Emily. She was in the morgue, but Mrs. Potholm told me they’d move he
r to a ‘viewing room,’ where I could ‘spend as much time with her’ as I liked.
“I remember walking down the corridor with Christy and Mrs. Potholm to the ‘viewing room,’ and reaching the swing doors and my knees buckling and Christy holding me up and telling me: ‘You have to do this. There’s no getting around it. But you will do it with me.’
“And then Mrs. Potholm held open the door and we went inside and . . .”
I paused and I looked up at Vern. He hadn’t moved. Outside, snow was falling, whiting out visibility. The world had vanished.
I continued.
“She was on a small gurney, a sheet pulled up to her shoulders. Everyone says the dead look asleep. But I stared down at my wonderful daughter and all I could think was: She’s gone, she’s never opening her eyes again and telling me she’s afraid of the dark or wants me to read her a bedtime story or . . .
“I stared down at Emily and could not escape the reality of what had happened. There was a huge blue contusion on her forehead, a deep gash on the side of her neck. And when I took her hands in mine they were ice. I thought I would fall apart again—but, at this moment, something came over me. Shock, I suppose you could call it . . . but it was deeper than shock. Trauma of the kind that simply sucks you into a vortex and . . .”
A deep, long, steadying breath.
“That night, I was released from the hospital under Christy’s surveillance. We got back to my apartment and I walked into Emily’s room and I sat down on her bed and . . .
“No, I didn’t fall apart again. Trauma has its own strange stupor. I just sat there for around an hour. Christy was there beside me, saying nothing . . . because there was nothing to say. She did force me to eat something—and she did insist on me taking the pills that the hospital prescribed. After tucking me in, she herself collapsed on the sofa . . . because I don’t think my wonderful friend had slept in over two days.
“But the pills did no good for me. I just lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling, knowing that all I could do now was die. That thought preoccupied me all night—especially as it was coupled with a horrendous instant replay of everything that had happened, and this insane growing belief that if I hurried back to the spot of the accident I could stop it. Turn time back completely and have my daughter hop off that mortuary gurney and come home to me . . .
“So, without thinking, I threw a robe on over my pajamas and grabbed my car keys and left the house. It was the middle of the night—and I drove right back to the place in Cambridge where it happened. Drove there, slammed on the brakes, got out, sat down on the pavement, and . . .
“All I can remember after that is this sense of falling. Falling into . . . an abyss? A chasm without a bottom? I don’t know. All I do know is that I sat in that spot for a long time . . . until some cops pulled up in a cruiser and tried to talk to me and when I said nothing, they called for backup and . . .
“I was kept overnight in a psychiatric hospital for observation. They found my home number. They called Christy. She showed up and explained everything. According to the shrink who signed me over to her, it was very common for someone who’d lost a ‘loved one’ in an accident to return to the scene in the hopes of . . .”
I broke off again.
Then: “I’m not going to tell you much about the funeral. An old college friend of mine had become a Unitarian minister. She conducted it. There weren’t many people there—some New England State colleagues, some Harvard people, the nanny, some people from the day care center, and the wife and daughter of the cabbie who’d hit Emily. They were crying even more than the rest of us. After the burial . . . you know, I’ve never once been back to my daughter’s grave, I just couldn’t . . . they gave Christy a letter from the family, saying how sorry they were. I never read it. Couldn’t. But Christy talked to the wife. It seems the guy—his name was Mr. Babula—had been so traumatized by what had happened that he quit his job and was on Valium or something, unable to leave the house, unable to deal with . . .
“But he’d been driving too fast. The police told Christy that. And he’d already got two violations against him for speeding. And they were bringing charges. And . . .”
Another pause.
“During all this, an all-points bulletin went out for Emily’s father. But he was nowhere to be found. We had the cops working on it. My lawyer. Even some of his so-called business associates. Running from creditors had made him go to ground. Not a fucking word from him. Until . . .
“But I jump ahead. After the funeral my department chairman told me I should take as much ‘compassionate leave’ as I wanted. I was back at work five days later. Everyone was stunned to see me—but I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I was operating on some very spectral autopilot in which it was impossible to make sense of anything. Christy had returned to Oregon. I had closed the door of Emily’s room and refused to go in there. I did my classes. I saw my students. I avoided my colleagues. I seemed to be functioning . . . even though my mind was increasingly preoccupied with the idea that I was living in this tunnel made of reinforced concrete. I could just about negotiate its narrow confines, but it was brutally limiting. There was no escaping it. There was no glimmer of light at the end of it. But—and this was the manic thing I kept telling myself—if I was just able to continue negotiating its confinement I would somehow be able to keep functioning . . .
“So, for around two weeks, I was an automaton twenty-four/seven. If anyone at the university asked me how I was doing I’d change the subject. I was doing how I was doing. I was coping. I was, privately, unhinged. But even I couldn’t admit that yet.
“Then two things happened. My lawyer called me to say that Theo had resurfaced. He’d been lying low with his paramour in Morocco while their lawyer did some fancy footwork with the company that had taken away the movie they were selling. I didn’t get all the details—I didn’t want all the details—but the crux of the matter was that there were threats of all kinds of lawsuits by Theo and his bitch, Adrienne. Their legal guy had found some way of blocking the release of the film. The film company had deep pockets and agreed to clear all the debts that Theo and Adrienne had run up in exchange for no legal action . . . and, hey presto, they were in the clear.
“My lawyer said that he had actually talked with Theo who was ‘devastated’ about what had happened to his daughter, and wanted to speak with me . . . but also didn’t want to ring me directly. ‘That’s courageous of him,’ I remember telling my lawyer, then adding: ‘Inform him that I never, ever, want to hear from him again.’
“Theo must have taken him at his word—because I didn’t hear from him. But ten days later, I was in a restaurant off Harvard Square having a meal. It was around eight—and this diner had become the place where I ate every meal, as I couldn’t bear to do anything in my apartment except drink myself to sleep with the aid of Zopiclone and red wine. The waiters there were so used to me by now—and the fact that I always ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and coffee—that the food always showed up around five minutes after I sat down.
“But on the night in question, as the sandwich arrived, I looked up and saw Theo and Adrienne coming in. They didn’t notice me at first, because I was in a booth in the back. Before I even could consider what I was doing, I threw some money down on the table, and grabbed my coat and the fork next to my plate. I walked straight toward Theo and Adrienne. They were waiting to be seated. Adrienne saw me first and actually said: ‘Jane! Oh, my God, we’re so—’
“Before she could finish the sentence I took the fork and plunged it right into the side of her neck. She screamed, there was blood everywhere, I kept right on walking out the door, then dashed across the street to a taxi stand and was in a cab before anyone could stop me.
“I was home ten minutes later. I threw clothes in a bag. I grabbed the necessary documentation, including my two passports and some cash and traveler’s checks. I tossed everything into my car. I started driving.
“Ten days later I drov
e into a snowbank in Montana. And . . .”
I fell silent again.
“End of story,” I said. “Except the woman I stabbed didn’t die and didn’t press charges. And when I messed up my suicide . . . well, maybe living was the punishment I would have to endure for killing my daughter . . .”
Finally Vern spoke.
“You didn’t kill your daughter.”
“Did you not listen to a word I just said?”
“You didn’t kill your daughter.”
“All the advice I got, all the steps I could have taken to avoid disaster, what did I do . . . ?”
“You didn’t kill her. That’s all there is to it.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“No, it’s not. Because I still blame myself for losing my daughter. Even though . . .”
Silence. He put his hand on top of mine. I pulled it away.
“What are you doing here with me?” I said. “I mean, do you really like damaged goods? Is that your kinky thing? Or do you actually think there’s some sort of weird romantic future between us?”
As soon as this was out of my mouth I loathed myself for it. And I turned to him and instantly said: “I’m sorry. I’m so stupid, so . . .”
I buried my head in his shoulder, but couldn’t cry. He put an arm around me, but I could tell he was nervous about doing it, fearful about how I might react.
“You know,” he said quietly, “even if I wanted ‘that,’ it could never be. The prostate cancer ended that part of my life . . . not that it had existed since my wife left me.”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2 Page 112